Kickstarter

The MaxProLogic claims to be an ultra low cost FPGA board coming in at US$37 or US$32 for the early birds. It’s built on the Altera MAX10 FPGA and its pretty cheap. At the moment you can pick up an Altera Max10 FPGA board on AliExpress for around US$75. This has an SD slot, bunch of LEDs, buck converter and breaks out 65 GPIOs. The campaign creator is by Earth People, who have run several other successful campaigns in the past, like the UnoProLogic2.

This next one is interesting. It’s a bunch of PCBs with an ATmega32U4 and MPU9250 IMU. It acts as an extra input when playing games so you can turn your head and it’ll change the field of view. I’m not a gamer, so don’t know if this would be a good idea or not, but looks interesting.

The Goliath CNC is a new take on an old idea. This CNC removes the tethering of X and Y axis and instead has three wheels that moves it around the work piece. So you can CNC any size you want. I do have my doubts about it:

The angular momentum of the motor during spin up of the router might cause it to lose position.

and accuracy would be a nightmare once you get to very large work pieces as the error rate would accumulate.

You define the work area by moving a rectangular thingy to the corners and I figure that the cable between that and the router would act as a frame of reference. So, it might actually work.

PiZerialized is a simple idea that provides what looks like a CP2104 USB to UART bridge in a handy board to be used with a Pi so you can get to the console easily. The campaign creator has several Kickstarters under his belt, so he’s been in this Rodeo before.

Stego Board isn’t an SBC, nor has it got any electronics on it. It is in fact a Mechano style building frame that has placement holes for a range of SBCs, hard disks, touch screens, NUCs, Brix, ITX motherboards and even VESA mounting holes. Finally! Someone has made one! You can stack them any which way; vertically, chuck them on the back of a TV or even in a funky triangle. They also have hard disk and power supply mounts.

I know, I did say last year that I wasn’t ever going to mention robotic assistants again, but this one is really cool! It doesn’t have legs, arms or an evil face. Instead it’s this drone thing slash vacuum cleaner that follows you around the house waiting for you to say something incredible. It has a 3D camera and can interface to Alexa so you can inadvertently order lots of expensive stuff whilst having that argument with your next door neighbor.

Apparently, it’s really quiet and the rotor blades don’t affect the audio pickup. Well, maybe… just check out the video of it in action.

CrowdSupply

In pre-launch there is the HwUI, which is a simple board giving you a bunch of capacitive touch inputs in various positions. As well as the Cypress capacitive touch sensor it also has an STM32 and BT53 Bluetooth module. The idea is that you can use it as a generic interface to anything.

Back in Weekly Roundup #21 there was the GnuBee, which was a small open source NAS running the MT7621A and 3 GbE ports allowing you to connect up 6 2.5″ drives. Well know there’s the GnuBee 2, with the only difference being that it can house 3.5″ drives instead.

STEAM Stories is an interesting one. It’s an educational tool teaching kids the basic concepts of electricity and circuits. You create 9 different circuits powered from a coin cell battery as you read through the story. Cool.

GroupGets

Back in Weekly Roundup something; I mentioned the Z-turn board. Well there’s now a GroupGets for this board, which will effectively knock off the shipping costs of up to US$40. This board runs the Xilinx XC7Z010, which is dual core Cortex-A9 and Xilinx-7 FPGA combo. Nice little board.

If you want some really seriously high speed acquisition. Then there’s the prudaq, which is a BeagleBone cape that can sample at up to 40Msps. There’s a long back story to this board involving Jason Holt and Google Research. This GroupGet is for the prudaq board, BeagleBone Black, 16G SD, 64G thumb drive and a BNC to SMA cable. Nice.

The DIY Thermocam is pretty expensive, but you are talking about thermal cameras here. This is a DIY unit that contains a bunch of stuff to create a pretty decent thermal camera. Note, however, that this does not contain the FLiR. You’ll have to buy one of those for around the same price as this GroupGet or find one in a dumpster.

This first Weeky Roundup of the year and we're already seeing lots of new goodies from SBCs, to WiFi modules, but really a tonne of new SBCs. Continue reading Weekly Roundup #62: New Maker Products // News→

This week's Weekly Roundup, which hasn't really been weekly for the past month, we're seeing a fair amount of retro kit, FPGAs and SBCs. Basically a whole lot of stuff that is really cool that you didn't know you needed. Continue reading Weekly Roundup #61: New Maker Products // News→

This week's Weekly Roundup is actually a little short, but we have FPGAs, SBCs and other cool things I've found in my travels on the interwebs. Continue reading Weekly Roundup #60: New Maker Products // News→

An SBC that's not really an SBC. Based on the NationalChip GX6605S, it runs a tiny Linux with a very small component count, but is it too cool to be usable? Continue reading The C-Sky SBC: Pi in the Sky? // Review→

In this review I take a look at one of the newer members of the Khadas family; The Khadas Edge and Khadas Captain. This board has some pretty interesting power management but, unfortunately, I saw the return of the magic smoke genie. Continue reading The Khadas Edge: A new captain

The LattePanda Alpha SBC is a bit of a beast not only in horse power, but in price. In this video I look at benchmarks on Windows, Linux and OSX and give my perspective on why LattePanda made a big mistake. Continue reading LattePanda Alpha: The big mistake? // Review→

This quick project shows you how to build an MQTT controlled RGB LED matrix panel in under 30 minutes, but I reckon it should take you a lot less. Continue reading Build an MQTT based RGB LED panel! // Project→

Do you want to be able to send an SMS over 20kms without using a mobile phone network? Here's one small project you can knock up in less than a day allowing you to send an SMS over LoRa. Continue reading SMS over LoRa: Long distance SMS without 4G //

If you're a fan of GoLang then your options are limited in the embedded world. So, here's a couple of options for you with a working bare metal example for an STM32 MCU written entirely in Go. Continue reading Running GoLang on an STM32 MCU. A quick tutorial.→

This is the second part of my video on building a simple PCB using EasyEDA. This time we'll be taking a look at how to use a solder stencil, placing SMD components, soldering using kitchen equipment and how to fix up your mistakes. Continue reading Make a PCB from scratch

A follow-up to my video tutorial: "Program an Atmel SAM without an IDE". I've created a Docker container on GitHub with a complete ASF build chain. Ready to go. Go for it! Continue reading Atmel Software Framework and build chain in a Docker container→

A bit of a different mailbag this week. Containing a lot of bits and pieces for upcoming projects and other odds and ends. Continue reading MickMake Mail #30: Gakken, JLCPCB, wicking and skulls // News→